Highly viable seeds are of great significance for agricultural development, and the traditional corn seed vigor detection method is time-consuming and laborious. In this paper, the spectral and image information of hyperspectral imaging was used, and a distinction between seed vigor detection and prediction was proposed. The potential of hyperspectral imaging technology and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to identify and predict maize seed vitality was evaluated. The hyperspectral information in 10 hours before the germination of four vigor level seeds (144 samples each) was collected. A support vector machine, extreme learning machine, and one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1DCNN) were used to model the spectral data set, comparing the effects of multidimensional scattering correction and principal component analysis. 1DCNN performed best on the original spectral data, reaching an accurate recognition of 90.11%. According to the spectral changes of the seed germination, the first three hours of data were selected for prediction, which had higher recognition accuracy than the test set. The image-based 2DCNN model achieved 99.96% accurate recognition at a fast convergence speed. By differentiating the spectra and image information, the various CNN models can achieve accurate detection and prediction, providing a framework to advance research on seed germination.

Gait phase detection is a new biometric method which is of great significance in gait correction, disease diagnosis, and exoskeleton assisted robots. Especially for the development of bone assisted robots, gait phase recognition is an indispensable key technology. In this study, the main characteristics of the gait phases were determined to identify each gait phase. A long short-term memory-deep neural network (LSTM-DNN) algorithm is proposed for gate detection. Compared with the traditional threshold algorithm and the LSTM, the proposed algorithm has higher detection accuracy for different walking speeds and different test subjects. During the identification process, the acceleration signals obtained from the acceleration sensors were normalized to ensure that the different features had the same scale. Principal components analysis (PCA) was used to reduce the data dimensionality and the processed data were used to create the input feature vector of the LSTM-DNN algorithm. Finally, the data set was classified using the Softmax classifier in the full connection layer. Different algorithms were applied to the gait phase detection of multiple male and female subjects. The experimental results showed that the gait-phase recognition accuracy and F-score of the LSTM-DNN algorithm are over 91.8% and 92%, respectively, which is better than the other three algorithms and also verifies the effectiveness of the LSTM-DNN algorithm in practice.

Plant temperature is an indicator of stomatal conductance, which reflects soil moisture stresses. We explored the relationship between plant temperature and soil moisture to optimize irrigation schedules in a water-stress experiment using Firmiana platanifolia (L. f.) Marsili in an incubator. Canopy temperature, leaf temperature, and stomatal conductance were measured using thermal imaging and a porometer. The results indicated that (1) stomatal conductance decreased with declines in soil moisture, and reflected average canopy temperature; (2) the variation of the leaf temperature distribution was a reliable indicator of soil moisture stress, and the temperature distribution in severely water-stressed leaves exhibited greater spatial variation than that in the presence of sufficient irrigation; (3) thermal indices (Ig) and crop water stress index (CWSI) were theoretically proportional to stomatal conductance (gs), Ig was certified to have linearity relationship with gs and CWSI have a logarithmic relationship with gs, and both of the two indices can be used to estimate soil moisture; and (4) thermal imaging data can reflect water status irrespective of long-term water scarcity or lack of sudden rainfall. This study applied thermal imaging methods to monitor plants and develop adaptable irrigation scheduling, which are important for the formulation of effective and economical agriculture and forestry policy.

This paper presents a viability assessment method for Pisum sativum L. seeds based on the infrared thermography technique. In this work, different artificial treatments were conducted to prepare seeds samples with different viability. Thermal images and visible images were recorded every five minutes during the standard five day germination test. After the test, the root length of each sample was measured, which can be used as the viability index of that seed. Each individual seed area in the visible images was segmented with an edge detection method, and the average temperature of the corresponding area in the infrared images was calculated as the representative temperature for this seed at that time. The temperature curve of each seed during germination was plotted. Thirteen characteristic parameters extracted from the temperature curve were analyzed to show the difference of the temperature fluctuations between the seeds samples with different viability. With above parameters, support vector machine (SVM) was used to classify the seed samples into three categories: viable, aged and dead according to the root length, the classification accuracy rate was 95%. On this basis, with the temperature data of only the first three hours during the germination, another SVM model was proposed to classify the seed samples, and the accuracy rate was about 91.67%. From these experimental results, it can be seen that infrared thermography can be applied for the prediction of seed viability, based on the SVM algorithm.